Emergency Collision Avoidance and Mitigation Using Model Predictive Control and Artificial Potential Function

Although extensive research in planning has been carried out for normal scenarios, path planning in emergencies has not been thoroughly explored, especially when vehicles move at a higher speed and have less space for avoiding a collision. For emergency collision avoidance, the controller should have the ability to deal with complicated environments and take collision mitigation into consideration since the problem may have no feasible solution. We propose a safety controller by using model predictive control and artificial potential function. A new artificial potential function inspired by line charge is proposed as the cost function for our model predictive controller. The new artificial potential function takes the shape of all objects into consideration. In particular, the artificial potential function that we proposed has the flexibility to fit the shape of the road structures such as the intersection, while the artificial potential function in most of the previous work could only be used in a highway scenario. Moreover, we could realize collision mitigation for a specific part of the vehicle by increasing the quantity of the charge at the corresponding place. We have tested our methods in 192 cases from 8 different scenarios in simulation. The simulation results show that the success rate of the proposed safety controller is 20% higher than using HJ-reachability with system decomposition. It could also decrease 43% of collision that happens at the pre-assigned part.